Lightroom Video – Moving Your Develop Presets

Hey folks. Here’s a quick video for you on moving presets. Say you get a new computer and you install Lightroom. Well, your old computer has all of your presets on it right? Once you know where they are, moving your presets from one computer to another is really just a drag-and-drop process. In fact, you can move more than just your Develop presets – you can move all of the presets you’d create in Lightroom (Print, Slideshow, Watermarks, Metadata templates, etc…) because they’re all stored in the same folder. I hope you enjoy!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

Make note of where you saved the file in case you want to make a copy as a backup or send your presets to someone else. You can select multiple presets to rename and will be able to specify a new name for each one.

Matt, Any reason I cant unzip this file. Im running a MacBook Pro 10.6.7. I clicked on to download and when i double click “the hangover.lrtemplate” in my download box it’s says Safari cant open because no available application can open it.
Thx Don

You might want to try dragging that file into the LR icon in your dock to install it, .lrtemplates seem to be a bit confusing for OSX. From there, LR will open and ask you if you want to install this preset, accept and you’re done.

Matt, that was brilliant! Not necessarily because I need to do that exact thing (though maybe I will some day), but because it triggered an idea of how to delete watermark presets I’ve made. Maybe it is just me but I have never been able to figure out how to delete watermark presets within LR. I have a whole bunch of them (long story why) that I’ve needed to delete and I’m so grateful that I can now delete them (using the same method you showed in the video to figuring out where those presets are stored and then just sending them moving them to the trash). So THANK YOU!

I think I will also use this method just to back up my LR preset folders in general since I don’t think I really have those saved anywhere right now. Thank you again!

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Forgive me if this was mentioned already, but just a little tip: Lightroom allows you to store your presets in the same location as the catalog, which I find useful as I only have to sync one folder for backup purposes.

I agree with Kevin’s reply to Daniel – I would like to share the App Support>Adobe>Lightroom folder between my desktop and my traveling laptop. Symlinks are a bit out of my area of competence. I have gotten so far as to have Dropbox establish a symlink to the Lightroom folder on my desktop, but how do I got my other computers to talk to that Dropbox folder? It seems like I need to be able to point Lightroom to an other-than-default location for the Lightroom folder but I don’t see a way to do that. Would love some help here – it really is a hassle trying to keep the two computers in sync with each other and I have occasionally made a real mess of my assorted presets.

My apologies if this is an elementary question. After viewing the 100 reasons Lightroom is better that Bridge I made the switch and purchased Lightroom . I am trying to figure our how to move my ACR presets to Lightroom. I can’t seem to figure this out. What am I missing?

On OS X the way I handle this is by creating a symlink from “~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets” to a folder in my Dropbox, say “~/Dropbox/Lightroom/Develop Presets”. I do this on all of my computers, which creates synchronization of those settings between systems. Any new additional presets or alterations to existing presets immediately get sent over to the other computers.

1) Quit dropbox on all of your machines. If you don’t do this you may get a filename conflict.

On each Mac, do the following:

2) In Finder, Make a backup copy of ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom (cmd-D on the folder should suffice)
3) Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
4) Type: ln -s ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom ~/Dropbox/Lightroom
5) Open /Applications/Dropbox.app

This will synchronize the Lightroom prefs to Dropbox. When you open Dropbox on your second Mac it will also update files. These may not be the ones you want though. If not, grab the versions that you want from the backup you took and drop them into LR or import them via the UI.

This is possible because on OS X, Dropbox follows symbolic links and includes their contents in the data that gets sent to the Dropbox service.